Isaac Charles Parker Quotes

I don't hang anyone—the law does.

Standing alone among great democratic nations in imposing the death penalty is another moral decision that Americansare being forced to confront.

Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a government program, so skepticism is in order.

The system of death-penalty justice is compromised and inequitable.

You will be excellently executed.

Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it.

It seems there are no rich on death row.

I don't think you should support the death penalty to seek revenge. I don't think that's right. I think the reason to support the death penalty is because it saves other people's lives.

In case anybody asks you about my position on capital punishment, you can tell them I favor it.

I regard the death penalty as a savage and immoral institution that undermines the moral and legal foundations of society. I reject the notion that the death penalty has any essential deterrent effect on potential offenders. I am convinced that the contrary is true - that savagery begets only savagery.

Of course, as a German, I wouldn't like to tell the American people how to handle their criminal justice.

The death penalty symbolizes whom we fear and don't fear, whom we care about and whose lives are not valid.

We do not correct the man we hang; we correct others by him.

Your honor, throughout this process I've asked the government and the court to hold me and only me accountable for my actions.

Life is indeed precious, and I believe the death penalty helps affirm this fact.

...Ned always said that the man who passes the sentence should swing the blade, though he never took any joy in the duty. But I would, oh, yes.

The death penalty experiment has failed.

The humorist who invented trial by jury played a colossal practical joke upon the world, but since we have the system we ought to try and respect it. A thing which is not thoroughly easy to do, when we reflect that by command of the law a criminal juror must be an intellectual vacuum, attached to a melting heart and perfectly macaronian bowels of compassion.

The main objection to killing people as a punishment...is that killing people is wrong

If one of our fellow citizens can be executed with so much doubt surrounding his guilt, then the death penalty system in our country is unjust and outdated.

There is a legitimate argument over whether the death penalty effectively deters violent crime, although my personal observation is that not one of the criminals who have been executed over the years has ever killed again.

The death sentence is a barbaric act.

The case of Andrews is really a very bad one, as appears by the record already before me. Yet before receiving this I had orderedhis punishment commuted to imprisonmentand had so telegraphed. I did this, not on any merit in the case, but because I am trying to evade the butchering business lately.

As one whose husband and mother-in-law have died the victims of murder and assassination, I stand firmly and unequivocally opposed to the death penalty for those convicted of capital offenses. An evil deed is not redeemed by an evil deed of retaliation. Justice is never advanced in the taking of a human life. Morality is never upheld by a legalized murder.